Jets of icy particles burst from Saturn's moon Enceladus in this brief
movie sequence of four images taken on Nov. 27, 2005. The sensational
discovery of active eruptions on a third outer solar system body (after
Jupiter's moon, Io, and Neptune's moon, Triton) is one of the great
highlights of the Cassini mission.

Images taken in January 2005, appeared to show the plume originating from
the fractured south polar region of Enceladus, but the visible plume was
only slightly brighter than the background noise in the image because the
lighting geometry was not suitable to reveal the true details of the
feature. This potential sighting, in addition to the detection of the icy
particles in the plume by other Cassini instruments, prompted imaging
scientists to target Enceladus again with exposures designed to confirm
the validity of the earlier plume sighting.

The new views show individual jets, or plume sources, that contribute to
the plume with much greater visibility than the earlier images. The full
plume towers over the 505-kilometer-wide (314-mile) moon, and is at least
as tall as the moon's diameter.

The four, 10-second exposures were taken over the course of about 36
minutes at approximately 12-minute intervals. Enceladus rotates about 7.5
degrees in longitude over the course of the frames, and most of the
observed changes in the appearances of the jets are likely due to changes
in the viewing geometry. However, some of the changes may be due to
actual variation in the flow from the jets on a time scale of tens of
minutes.

Additionally, the shift of the sources seen here should provide
information about their location in front of and behind the visible limb
(edge) of Enceladus.

These images were obtained using the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle
camera at distances between 144,350 and 149,520 kilometers (89,695 and
92,907 miles) from Enceladus and at a phase angle of about 161 degrees.
Image scale is about 900 meters (2,950 feet) per pixel on Enceladus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.